This illustration by Stephen Reid, published in 1904 in Eleanor Hull's The Boys' Cuchulain, depicts the death of Cú Chulainn at the Battle of Mag Muirthemne: the wounded hero strapped to a standing stone (the modern Clochafarmore at Knockbridge, County Louth), refusing to die lying down. According to the Ulster Cycle, Cú Chulainn fought his enemies to the last breath in this upright position, and only when the raven of the goddess Morrígan settled on his shoulder did the hero's enemies know he was finally dead.

Cú Chulainn (the Hound of Culann) is the central hero of the Ulster Cycle, the second of the four canonical cycles of Irish mythology after the Mythological Cycle. His exploits are recorded in the Táin Bó Cúailnge (the Cattle Raid of Cooley), the longest single narrative of medieval Irish literature, preserved in three principal manuscripts (the Lebor na hUidre, the Yellow Book of Lecan, and the Book of Leinster) compiled between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries from oral and earlier written traditions dating ultimately to the Iron Age.

Stephen Reid (1873 to 1948) was a Glasgow-born illustrator who specialized in Celtic mythological subjects during the height of the Celtic Revival. His illustrations for Eleanor Hull's children's retellings (The Boys' Cuchulain, 1904; Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, 1909) and for Standish O'Grady's reconstructions of the Irish epic tradition are among the canonical visual interpretations of the Ulster Cycle in the modern era. They sit alongside the painting of John Duncan, the sculpture of Oliver Sheppard (whose 1911 bronze of the dying Cú Chulainn stands in the General Post Office in Dublin), and the literary work of Yeats and Lady Gregory as foundational documents of the early-twentieth-century Irish cultural awakening.